To the uninformed observer it may seem baffling how geneticists, biochemists, paleontologists, and other researchers can claim that two creatures that look as different as a man and a monkey could not only be "related" but have been produced by evolution over the last couple million years.

I. It's All in the Genes

But the key to understanding evolution is to understand genetics: our body is driven by protein enzymes, which catalyze critical processes inside the body. Many proteins share common domains. And the blueprints to all the proteins a creature makes are stored in a special highly-ordered storage construct called DNA.

While living organisms go to great lengths to preserve their genetic code without errors like swapped sections or deletions, occassionally during the process of making sperm and eggs such an error is made. Most errors result in infertility or death of the offspring. But occasionally just the right combination of protein domains has accidentally been clumped together, producing something that fundamentally transforms the organism.

Researchers have finally found a gene -- perhaps the gene -- which separates humans from the ancestors they share with apes.

Humans and apes, both members of the order Primates, share 96 percent of their genetic code. Most of the remaining 4 percent is so-called "junk" DNA; stretches of mostly inactive code.

Of course, junk DNA is not useless geneticists and biochemists have recently discovered. It has been shown to in many cases play a key role in regulation of other genes' expression and other "epigenetic" effects.

But researchers had yet to discover a truly active gene that humans have that apes lack -- until now.

II. miR-941 May Hold the Key to How Mankind is so Crafty

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland have discovered a gene called miR-941, which is only found in humans and is absent in their primate relatives.

The gene was actively being transcribed in the regions of the brain responsiible for language learning and decision making. Researchers hypothesize that it may play a key role in abilities that are largely unique to humans, such as formulating, understanding, and preserving multiple complex communications codes (languages) and developing advanced tools (weapons, machinery).

Some other creatures -- gorillas, parrots, dolphins, and whales -- show different levels of sign language or spoken/sung language skills. And chimpanzees, octupi, and other creatures have been shown to use basic implements, like sticks, as tools. However, only humans are known to manifest these helpful survival skills in more complex manners.

Now, modern genetics may have cracked a key mystery of human evolution and explained why.

The research was published in the prestigious peer-review journal Nature Communications.

no, no, you have the question totally wrong. It should be 'What makes evolution possible?' (so all us religious people can sit back and watch the Atheists with all their higher brain functions squirm) And really you'll typically find that the most intelligent people are 'religious' , one of the reasons being that evolution/atheism is not really an intellectual belief system and has far too many failings to be reasonable or rational. There are good reasons why men like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, or virtually every Apollo astronaut believed in something else. These are men with IQ well above the norm, people even like Christopher Langan and his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe which at least makes an attempt to understand the idea of 'God.' Even with his extreme IQ though, his math can't compete with thousands of years of theology, by the best and brightest individuals who ever lived. Evolutionists are just generally so ignorant and arrogant that actually believe they have 'religion' figured out, when in reality they are just ignorant both in terms of religious beliefs and scientific method. The very saying, 'I'm not religious' is in fact a religious statement, and simply implies that the person doesn't know what religion actually is.

Explain how believing in only what is verifiably, repeatedly true is religion? Science is looking at the unknown, admitting it's unknown, and trying to find out enough about it and how it works to understand it while religion is just poring over the same book which is true because it says it is and stating that if we don't have an answer it's a mystery and therefore it was our invisible sky daddy that did it. Admit it, either you don't know what religion is or you're just too uncomfortable that people are perfectly capable of living happy, productive and ethical lives without the representatives of their invisible sky daddy telling them what to think. Also congrats on holding up a bunch of writers as paragons of intelligence and knowledge. As it turns out most scientists, who if religion were true would be the ones witnessing most of the divine mysteries are overwhelmingly atheist.

Where have you been for the past 150 years? The "theory of evolution" was called that prior to it being proven, now that it has long since been proven, it is just called evolution, also called scientific fact. It's been proven many times over. Its not even a debate anymore. There are those that understand the true history of Earth and what happened here, and how life evolved and there are uneducated dorfs that cant accept reality. It's been proven time and time again. Its been proven int he 100's of thousands of fossils found all over hte earth, its been proven in our DNA, its been proven via geological evidence as well as archaeological evidence. It has also been witnessed as strains of germs develop resistances antibiotics. It is also proven in human skin color. The difference between black and white people is simply that white people skins lightened as they moved to less sunny environments to allow the body to get more vitamin D. The UV rays of the sun kill it and dark skin is a mutation to protect it. Skin color evolved to maintain the correct levels. There is no debate that evolution happened. We may not know how it started, and/or who started it or possibly created the laws of the universe that enabled it but we know it happened.

If you want to have a religious debate, it can be said that a god or whatever created the universe and the laws of physics that allowed evolution to happen. You could even debate that a god created evolution with humans in mind as the end result, but you CANNOT say that evolution didnt happen... It is absolutely 100% proven. IF you think it isnt you need to go back to school, because your bible college has lied to you and given you false talking points to try and discredit proven science.

The key thing about evolution is that it is a proposed mechanism which inherently makes predictions about the world and those predictions have repeatedly shown themselves true.

Things like forests, where all the trees could save energy and nutrient intake by being shorter but each individual tree has an incentive to grow taller invariably show that the changes which increase individual fitness even at the cost of serious expense for the ecosystem as a whole are favored strongly. The competition between species where average individual success is rewarded rather than the good of the ecosystem as a whole is a major claim of the scientific theory of evolution and the myriad examples of it are evidence for it (I'm using scientific theory to distinguish "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment" from "a bunch of ideas they've been kicking around for a while").

The fossil record is another vital piece of evidence. A single evolutionary descendent that could be proven to have existed before its predecessor would discredit the whole theory. None so far have been found, but many, many "missing links" have been found (the missing link is a ridiculous concept because species are an artificial distinction applied to a gradual progression with no fixed beginning or end which is as ridiculous as trying to look at the gradient of all colors and trying to pick the precise wavelength at which light stops being red and starts being orange when the reddest orange and orangest red will be nearly indistinguishable).

A scientific theory is a proposed mechanism which explains why some things work the way they do and it makes predictions and those predictions must never be false. Otherwise it will cease to be a theory.

I believe you missed the point and really are actually helping prove that very notion. First off, there is NO fossil evidence supporting evolution at all, none. Every claim made by evolutionists has been exposed as either intentional fraud or simply bad science. The excuse that evolution is to slow to observe is even more feeble, and is a literal admission that evolution is not science. It's no different than JW's claiming that Jesus came to North America invisibly... Science relies on facts, the apple fell from the tree because of GRAVITY. A measurable, testable, repeatable concept. You mentioned ecosystems, evolution actually works against ecosystems, against forests and interdependency. In fact ecosystems shouldn't even exist if evolution were true, dependency is literally less evolved. Also any animal or plant wanting to do something, or grow taller as you suggest is complete irrelevant, wanting something does not change your DNA. (there are numerous books and papers on this subject, from DNA to ecosystems in general) Evolution is not a mechanism, it does not make predictions, it doesn't think or reason, and it has never been shown to be true... and why? Because the fundamental laws of nature, precious scientific LAW prevents evolution from happening. And yes, this includes the laws of physics including the laws of thermodynamics. The only possible way for evolution to occur requires things like perpetual motion machines, and a complete disregard for every single scientific discovery mankind has made. The door for evolution as a mechanism or theory closed the very instant life was shown to exist at a cellular level. The discovery of DNA was like sealing evolution in a coffin, screwing it closed then welding a steel box around it and throwing it into the sun. Evolution is as far as science is concerned is DEAD. It has no basis and really only exists today as a religious fantasy. Before Darwin atheists had nothing, literally nothing, to justify their beliefs and were not considered intellectuals. And now even to this day it is the only thing they have to cling too, the one single justification they use to promote their beliefs, and like many other religious beliefs its complete BS. Simply watch any debate, Richard Dawkins or whoever verses an intelligent designer or even a Creationist, the evolutionists get slaughtered every time...and mostly because their beliefs are not based in science and therefore not true to reality.

I'm starting to think now that your trolling. Because no 1 can be that incredibly and totally ignorant.claims made by scientists about evolution haven't been disproved, they support each other thousands and thousands and thousands of times over with collaborative data from fossil evidence , geological evidence, archaeological evidence and DNA evidence. Just because you're to mind numbingly ignorant to understand these things doesn't make them not true, it just makes you ignorant.and if you are just trolling, whatever that's almost equally ignorant. I really hope that you are trolling because it saddens me to think that people are really that dumb. your intellectual level has come nowhere for the past 2000 years. Proving that some of us evolve faster than others